While looking for life on planets beyond our own solar system, a group of international scientists has created a colorful catalog containing reflection signatures of Earth life forms that might be found on ...

The first 3D reconstruction of the skull of a 360 million-year-old near-ancestor of land vertebrates has been created by scientists from the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge, UK. The 3D skull, which ...

An international team of scientists which included three University of Granada and the Andalusian Institute of Earth Sciences researchers (a joint UGR-CISC centre) have found new data on the weather in the ...

The tunable laser spectrometer in the SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) instrument of the Curiosity robot has unequivocally detected an episodic increase in the concentration of methane in Mars' atmosphere after ...

"Robotic controllers let the CATS out of the bag!" So says NASA spokesman Dan Huot in a cool new NASA timelapse video showing in detail how CATS crawled around the space stations gangly exterior and clawed ...

Researchers who are building the highest-resolution map of the Greenland Ice Sheet to date have made a surprising discovery: two lakes of meltwater that pooled beneath the ice and rapidly drained away.

Chemical analysis of some of the world's oldest rocks, by an international team led by McGill University researchers, has provided the earliest record yet of Earth's atmosphere. The results show that the ...

An investigation of a 415-million-year-old fish skull strongly suggests that the last common ancestor of all jawed vertebrates, including humans, was not very shark-like. It adds further weight to the growing ...

An exciting new special issue of the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences shines the spotlight on the Danek Bonebed in Edmonton, Alberta and increases our knowledge of Edmonton's urban dinosaurs, especially the ic ...

Just how did the Earth—our home and the place where life as we know it evolved—come to be created in the first place? In some fiery furnace atop a great mountain? On some divine forge with the hammer ...

For the world's deteriorating environment, don't blame burning fossil fuels exclusively. Land use and land cover changes contribute about 40 percent to "radiative forcing," a key underlying factor in global warming, according ...

A team of geologists in the U.S. has finally found an analyzable sample of the most abundant mineral in the world allowing them to give it a name: bridgmanite. In their paper published in the journal Science, the te ...

Barely two months after being launched to the International Space Station (ISS), NASA's first science payload aimed at conducting Earth science from the stations exterior has started its ocean wind monitoring ...

Doesn't this make you want to book a trip on the next spaceship? Stunning footage from space here shows what auroras look like from the International Space Station. So many ripples of green. Such awesomeness.

Earth science

Earth science (also known as geoscience, the geosciences or the Earth Sciences), is an all-embracing term for the sciences related to the planet Earth. It is arguably a special case in planetary science, the Earth being the only known life-bearing planet. There are both reductionist and holistic approaches to Earth science.

There are four major disciplines in earth sciences, namely geography, geology, geophysics and geodesy. These major disciplines use physics, chemistry, biology, chronology and mathematics to build a quantitative understanding of the principal areas or spheres of the Earth system.